Before Creedence had its name, a rough B-side was already learning the weight of the groove.
Released in 1967 as the B-side to The Golliwogs single “Porterville”, “Call It Pretending” catches the band at an unusually revealing threshold. The song was written by John Fogerty, and its importance is not that it sounds like a finished Creedence Clearwater Revival record. It matters because it stands close to the moment before the change: the same four musicians, still recording under a name they would soon leave behind, beginning to strip their music down to something more severe, more rhythmically certain, and more rooted in American blues and rock and roll.
The group had spent much of the 1960s working through different identities. John Fogerty, Tom Fogerty, Stu Cook, and Doug Clifford had started earlier as The Blue Velvets and then recorded a series of singles as The Golliwogs. Some of that early work carried the marks of the era’s beat-group language, with the band still testing how much of itself could fit inside current pop shapes. By late 1967, however, the writing was tightening. “Porterville”, the A-side, would later be carried forward onto Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1968 debut album, but the reverse side has its own quiet value. “Call It Pretending” is the sound of a band not yet famous and not yet fully defined, discovering how much force could come from less.
The record’s blues feeling is not ornamental. It sits in the compactness of the groove, the dry insistence of the guitar attack, and the way the performance avoids polish in favor of pressure. The rhythm section does not sprawl; it moves like a working engine, keeping the song close to the ground. The singing has the sharp, unvarnished quality that would soon become central to Fogerty’s records: not theatrical, not sweetened, but pushed into the phrase as if the line has to earn its place. Even when the song leans on familiar blues-rock grammar, the band’s discipline keeps it from becoming loose imitation.
That discipline is the bridge to CCR. The later band would build a world from concise parts: a guitar figure with a recognizable silhouette, a backbeat that refused to decorate itself, a vocal tone that made ordinary words sound weathered and urgent. “Call It Pretending” has those elements in early form. The swamp-rock atmosphere associated with Creedence Clearwater Revival was never simply a matter of geography; the group came from the Bay Area, and the Southern shadows in the music were shaped through records, radio, imagination, and craft. On this B-side, the craft is still visible at the seams.
The title also suggests the kind of plain speech Fogerty was moving toward. “Call It Pretending” does not need an elaborate narrative frame to carry tension. It works through direct address and emotional friction, the feeling of naming a falsehood rather than dressing it up. That kind of bluntness would serve Fogerty well in the Creedence years. His strongest songs often trusted hard, simple language, letting the voice and rhythm supply the deeper weather. Here the approach is not yet fully distilled, but the outline is clear: no grand pose, no crowded arrangement, just insistence.
As a B-side, the song also benefits from its smaller historical burden. It does not have to explain the band, carry an album, or represent a movement. It can be rough. It can reveal process. For later listeners, that is part of its appeal. The record lets us hear development without the smoothing effect of hindsight. The Golliwogs are not yet wearing the public identity that would make Creedence Clearwater Revival one of the major American rock bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They are still in the workshop, and the tools are beginning to sound like themselves.
There is a useful humility in hearing the recording this way. Popular memory often prefers clean beginnings: a new name, a first album, a breakthrough single. Music rarely moves so neatly. It gathers itself in overlooked sides, in small choices, in the hardening of a beat or the removal of an unnecessary flourish. “Call It Pretending” reminds us that transformation can be audible before it is announced. The record is not a monument; it is a trace of motion, and that may be its strongest charm.
By the time CCR reached a wider audience, Fogerty’s voice as a writer and bandleader had become far more concentrated. But this 1967 B-side remains valuable because it preserves the moment before concentration became certainty. In its raw, bluesy edges, The Golliwogs were not simply pretending toward a future name. They were learning the shape of the sound that would soon carry them there.
